Month: January 2018

A couple of years ago, I was stopped outside MacEwan by a young woman.
“Are you Mr. Thompson?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, thinking she must be a student.
“I was in your daughter’s class in elementary. You used to come in and tell us stories.”
I was touched that this young woman remembered those stories and thought to say hello, especially since elementary for my kids was more than a decade in the past.
My kids have always had an experience of books. Their mom started reading to them before they could talk. For my part, I tried ordering print-braille books so I could read to them as well, but books took ages to arrive by mail, which meant the whole thing was more frustrating than anything else.
I was lucky enough to have taken a children’s literature course with Jon Stott during my undergrad, so out of desperation, I pulled out my old textbook to see if I could find a story to tell my two-year-old. The first story I ever told her was “Kate Crackernuts.” She heard that story every night for three months, and I doubt she heard the ending until much later. But telling stories became part of the ritual at bedtime, which lasted for years.
Later on, when my kids started school, I went into their class and told stories—stories I found in books or on the Internet. The teacher had the idea to turn all those stories into a project. The kids drew pictures of their favourite stories, and my mom and another parent transferred those pictures onto fabric. The whole thing became the Storytelling Quilt.
Reading aloud to children is a powerful thing. Research suggests reading aloud helps both general literacy and reading acquisition. But consider –reading to your own kids means spending time with them, and spending such time goes a long way to actively showing your kids how much you care.
February 1 is World Read Aloud Day, sponsored by Scholastic. If you can, take the time to read aloud to a child in your life. And if you can’t manage it for February 1, remember that every day of the year offers such an opportunity.

Ursula Le Guin, a giant in science fiction and fantasy, died this week at the age of eighty-eight. I read the news this morning on Vox. Sorrow, fondness, and a deep nostalgia all came in a rush as I read the post, my coffee growing cold beside my keyboard.
As a thirteen-year-old, geeky kid who mostly felt like an alien, I was starving for books. Two years before, I lost my sight in a car accident, and since then, reading had become my life. J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings created a space in my head I never knew existed; those books gave me a hunger for fantasy that was impossible to slake.
In those days, I read books on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. That thing weighed fifteen pounds and was bigger than a boot box. Many of my books came from The Materials Resource Centre in downtown Edmonton, which was then part of Alberta Education. Lesley Aiken ran the MRC, and we talked about books whenever I visited.
One day, Lesley gave me a copy of The Tombs of Atuan, the second book in Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea cycle. She thought I would like it since I liked Tolkien. I was curious and excited, and was immediately transported by Earthsea and its archipelago.
Reading Le Guin for the first time opened my mind in new ways—yet again. As a teen, I found her worlds—especially the science fiction—more challenging, but I think I can say Le Guin helped me take my first steps towards becoming a feminist.
For me, Ged and his journey to Roke Island was the original story of the school for wizards, thirty years before the Boy Who Lived appeared on shelves. I read Le Guin through my twenties and thirties, including her books and essays as part of my PhD thesis. I even taught The Left Hand of Darkness to a first-year class at MacEwan. This last November, I decided to finish reading Le Guin’s Chronicles of the Western Shore, a series that includes Gifts, Voices, and Powers.
So you see, Le Guin is one of those authors who has literally been part of my whole reading life. If you haven’t read Le Guin, find one of her books or read some of her stories. She is, without a doubt, one of the giants of twentieth century science fiction and fantasy. She’ll be missed.